Angelastic wrote:Did you know that Mac speech synthesis pronounces a single letter repeating with whitespace between the individual letters […] as only three of that letter, no matter how many there actually are? …

Yes, I noticed something similar: long strings of letters without spaces also get treated that way. Some examples from the OTT (pardon my excessive use of profanities):

This wierdness did not exist in the 1980's when the Mac speech synthesiser software was still pretty new. There was a cool hack called "The Talking Moose" that would pop up and make inane quips while you work. It also allows you to convert text to phonemes and to audible speech. You can try it out, here.

Converting text to phonemes in Mac OS 7.5.3

The phoneme codes in the late 1980's

How variable numbers of vowels were handled.

The phonemes haven't changed much, nor the basic capabilities and how it is accessed. This makes Speech Manager one of the few things that has continuity over the 30+ year history of the Mac.

Angelastic wrote:Did you know that Mac speech synthesis pronounces a single letter repeating with whitespace between the individual letters […] as only three of that letter, no matter how many there actually are? …

Yes, I noticed something similar: long strings of letters without spaces also get treated that way. Some examples from the OTT (pardon my excessive use of profanities):

That doesn't surprise me, though; if anything, I'm surprised that there *are* more syllables in chiiirp than there are in chirp, since I'd still say it as one syllable, and the length of the phoneme is controlled separately (with TUNE contours or other embedded speech commands, or some other internal way in the new/other-language voices which don't support those.)

Another epsilonish thing is that:

ooohh

and

ooohh.

are pronounced as one syllable, while:

ooohh..

is spelled out. This could be related to the fact that the dot is pronounced in P.S but not in P.S., but I don't think so, because that rule doesn't apply to things such as domain names and IPs with more than one letter between dots. Going through all these edge cases of haiku, I have come to the conclusion that the speech synthesis is frightfully clever, and has a lot of interesting rules about punctuation which tend to get things right most of the time, even if they can m*stard things up a bit when you're trying to decide which punctuation to take into account for which word when counting syllables. I have also come to the conclusion that this thread is full of molpy-ch*rping insane things I should just not even try to get right because nobody would ever look for haiku in:

(any ^body) (^findme-^ee a) ^ ^ ^ ^ (^new wa^y to) [2:36] (^blitz)

or complain that they didn't intend for the second :30 to be pronounced 'colon three zero' in this poem:

Coming up on 3:30. Coming up on x:30?

or that jjjdavidson is not pronounced as a double dactyl.

Anyway, there were decisions to make about various things, but I'm hoping the post-coma build will have the best haiku list so far, and I will stop discovering new things to do for long enough to actually release it.

M*stard, once again I didn't make it to coma until sunrise.

Oh yeah, I don't think I used the talking moose, though I've seen nostalgia about it. I'll have a look post-coma. Maybe it's because I went straight from 7.1 to Mac OS 8? I did enjoy showing the speech to people at school.

Did you know that the original PlainTalk speech recognition team in 1990 or so apparently had T-shirts that read, 'I helped Apple wreck a nice beach'?

Knight Temporal, and Archdeacon of buttermongery and ham and cheese sandwiches. Nobody sells butter except through me.Smiley by yappobiscuits. Avatar by GLR, buffygirl, BlitzGirl & mscha, with cari.j.elliot's idea.Haiku Detectorstarts a trend to make way formy robot army.

mrob27 wrote:The only icon I've had any part in is Ready. [image] (Look familiar? ) But that icon violates the "don't make it look like an iOS app" rule. It's not on the App Store and I don't know if there are plans to make it an app for any store, but I doubt Apple could object to this icon if the shape were changed to a circle.

Just give it no shape at all. That is, take away everything outside the light blue band, and let that fade into transparent. This gives the icon the natural (tilted-u) shape of the key part of the image. It also becomes more recognizable in monochrome, just by the shape.

Hi Rosencrantz! Welcome to the nutcastle!

I'm going to follow my own decree again; there's stuff that I want to reply to that I can't remember, but if I wait for it, I won't post. So, time for the other commandment.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Heartfelt thanks from addams and from me - you really made a difference.

Now – what is this?I guess it's some kind of detector to examine the ground of the Moon.Maybe they have found something interesting and are looking for more?Maybe whatever they found is RELATED to object generation and chronotransponding?

(Hey, I suspected from the very beginning that the Wheelstick is more than just a toy!)

For almost 4 wips now, the mr*bdex has featured an special type of diply m*stard, which I only just noticed and fixed. I'm surprised nobody pointed it out. Fortunately, it didn't affect the bOTTeriada text (ONGs) so far as I can tell. But a lot of the nopix and Newpages weren't being listed and newwords were in the wrong places, and other oddness.

Angelastic wrote:this thread is full of molpy-ch*rping insane things I should just not even try to get right because nobody would ever look for haiku in: (any ^body) (^find me-^ee a) ^ ^ ^ ^ (^new wa^y to) [2:36] (^blitz)

Yeah that would be me rendering a 5-part vocal score into ASCII. Ch*rp, but everything was out of tune in that song. I didn't realise that two of my accompaniment tracks were out of tune with each other until it was far too late. Autotune only made it worse. I'd have to record and remix the whole song again from scratch, but it was so much work. I tracked myself so many times to get all those choral voices, and strained my voice too high. But I did find one good, if surreal, haiku, out of 86 lines of m*stard:

Blitz help me Vytronor CasCat or T man 4:36 molpies

or that jjjdavidson is not pronounced as a double dactyl.

I fixed that one myself. Do you want my manually-created list of syllable-lengths for OTT-specific words?

Oh yeah, I don't think I used the talking moose, though I've seen nostalgia about it. I'll have a look post-coma. Maybe it's because I went straight from 7.1 to Mac OS 8?

The Talking Moose started before System 7, because some features "cannot be used in MultiFinder", a claim that only makes sense prior to System 7. I hadn't heard that PlainTalk "nice beach" joke. I had both a Centris 660AV and a Power Mac 6100/60, but never used the PlainTalk microphones for anything. I got those machines to do my own heavy number-crunching. It was crazy fun getting the latter to do useful work at more than 90 million floating-point operations per second!

balthasar_s wrote:Maybe you're secretely an OTTer too

I'll have to add a definition of OTTer for which that statement is true. Or maybe I already have, and it's a secret.

Gack! I hit edit instead of quote on my last post and accidentally annihilated it.ETA: fixed now, based on checking the mirror and re-entering the correct post.

--------

I am simultaneously embarrassed and happy to report that I've made it to 8 in my Seinfeld's Don't Break the Chain mission. So far, so good. It's not really RELATED yet, but maybe at some point it will be.

Also, today I watched a short film on youtube in Polish. I didn't understand a word, but enjoyed it nonetheless. I google-translated the description and it appears to be about time travel and a bicycle. It was shot somewhere much prettier than the moon though.

Moonboots are made for walkONG:

ETA2:

balthasar_s wrote:I'll no longer have the bike that you could see in my related films.

I have a cool idea for a useful userscript but I don't have time to do it now.Maybe in 2 months?

ggh wrote:Also, today I watched a short film on youtube in Polish. I didn't understand a word, but enjoyed it nonetheless. I google-translated the description and it appears to be about time travel and a bicycle. It was shot somewhere much prettier than the moon though.

There are people some making Polish films about time travel and bicycles? Now I'm curious.

ggh wrote:

balthasar_s wrote:I'll no longer havethe bike that you could see inmy related films.

Where's it going?

It has a damage wich can't be completely fixed anymore. Even if I did, It would fail in a few months again. So I need a new one. I already bought a new one. Now I only have to adjust it for the moon. Because it's from a different place:I'll reuse the wheels, black box and red switch from the previous one. Then I'll give the old bike to my parents. They don't use a bike as much as I do (I make over 40km almost every day) so it'll last much longer there.

I think you may have heard of it. Takie Czasy. The bicycle in it... I think I've seen it somewhere before.

ETA: I used to ride a lot (not as much as you) thirty years ago, and my beloved old bike developed a neat "fault" where if I applied too much pressure to the pedals, it slipped into a lower gear - so for instance, if I was going up a hill, it would slip from 3rd to 2nd, and to 1st if I was still struggling. As I'd start going back down, 3rd would catch again. It was like having an automatic transmission.

ggh wrote:I think you may have heard of it. Takie Czasy. The bicycle in it... I think I've seen it somewhere before.

Indeed, I remember seeing it. I even wanted to add English subtitles to it. Maybe some day.

and my beloved old bike developed a neat "fault" where if I applied too much pressure to the pedals, it slipped into a lower gear

My redundant bike (probably built in the 70s) used to do this too. Until one day this failed and the wheel was completely blocked. I tried to fix it. But soon It started doing it again. One year later it failed again. On the same street. Almost exactly in the same place.

They do, but they also charge the prices they used to for those bikes (corrected for inflation of course). They simply also make sub E1000 bicycles. You get what you pay for.There are some really awesome shops around. If you get a bike with a Rohloff hubgear you can expect to pay upward of E2000. Approximately E1000 of that is for the hubgear alone.

Mikeski wrote:A "What If" update is never late. Nor is it early. It is posted precisely when it should be.

ggh wrote:my beloved old bike developed a neat "fault" where if I applied too much pressure to the pedals, it slipped into a lower gear

The last time I applied too much pressure, the bottom bracket exploded. They don't make 'em like they used to...

*looks up what a bottom bracket is* Yup, eventually that broke open on my bike, but I was so unreasonably attached to the thing that my Dad and I actually mended it - bound it back together with wire if I remember correctly.

I don't think it was a good brand, but man, that bike had heart. I haven't ridden for a while, but when I had a go about ten years back, I was surprised to find that how to make a seat had been forgotten somewhere in the years.

I just filed a bug with Apple because of something I found while working on Haiku Detector which I am pretty sure is m*stard. On Mac OS X 10.10.3, two carriage returns (\r) followed by any integer, a dot, then a space, will be pronounced 'zero'.

The last time I reported a bug to Apple, I was on Mac OS X 10.1.3. What a difference a zero makes.

went upstairs for a well-deserved nip's coma. Next morning he strolled across the valley to see Balthacarius. As soon as he was told that he was invited to witness the debut performance of Mrorl's newly constructed OTTronic Bard, Balthacarius dropped what he had been doing and quickly followed Mrorl back, so eager was he to witness Mrorl's humiliation. Mrorl let the machine warm up first, with the power on low; ran up some stairs to check the dials on level three, then to a higher balcony to check the readings on a screen; then once he was confident everything was as expected he shouted down to Balthacarius and invited him to start with a simple request. Later, of course, when the machine was fully warmed up Balthacarius could ask it to produce verses on whichever topic and in whatever style he liked. Now the main display indicated the machine's allegorical buffers were pre-loaded, and alliterative dynamos pre-charged, so Mrorl, nervously, switched the main lever over to *full*. A voice, trembling a bit but with clear diction, said: *Etteleettap. Iqueaxvan. Zoorth.* Balthacarius paused, glanced at a nearby screen, then up at Mrorl and politely asked, "Is that it?" Mrorl only shrugged, pulled a couple levers and punched a large button, then Balthacarius tried again. This time the voice was a bit higher, a melodic baritone, which intoned: <*:Dimepa biimika likirge ake ga, Lakirginshurguu dasakiim legu-- Migishaaka urli, shikakaga sha: Imkur enum anki, ungi akikarsu!:> "Am I missing something?" asked Balthacarius, as Mrorl began to sweat and struggled at the controls. Finally Mrorl shouted out almost as if in surprise, clambered up yet another set of metal stairs, threw open a small access panel and crawled inside, vanishing from Balthacarius' sight. Clanking noises echoed inside, and occasionally lights flashed and the humming of the machine's lyrical oscillators

THE MOLPIEST PART OF SUSTAINABILIZUNG IS REDUNDANCY IN YOUR CUSTARD -- ongomome

Spoiler:

LOOK OUT!

Did you notice …… what Cueganzzle are doing?

Spoiler:

AluisioASG did.ucim ENHANCEd it.Ms. Frizzle can operate the Wheeled Thing alone now, without the support of the ropes (which are lying loosely on the slope again). Cuegan can just watch.Meanwhile, the Wheeled Thing is rolling over a riverish stone.

BlitzGirl, ZoomanSP, and AluisioASG did.ucim ENHANCEd it.After rolling over a riverish stone the Wheeled Thing falls down on a barrel – which gives way. The wheel penetrates into the barrel, dispersing a lot of dust. When it falls down, the pole hits a rock and bends slightly. The damage is barely visible, but it jams the mechanism to extend the forward section, thus turning the device inoperable.

… the rope?

Spoiler:

The sudden fall of the Wheeled Thing is causing some tension in the upper parts of Cueball's rope.

ucim wrote:Just give it no shape at all. That is, take away everything outside the light blue band, and let that fade into transparent.

Oh yes, that'd be great. Since the image is auto-generated and the colours are arbitrary, one could easily make a grayscale colour-map so that edge is totally black (or white) and the rest gray, then use that image to generate the alpha (transparency) channel and combine with another full-colour image.

ggh wrote:ETA: fixed now, based on checking the mirror and re-entering the correct post.

Three BOOM-DE-YADAs for ЯОЯЯІМ ТТОƎНТ! That "Don't Break the Chain" blog article has been reposted multiple times. If the original Darren Hardy link fails, a DuckDuckGoogleBing search for "calendar for today" "knock out 300 jokes" ought to find it.

today I watched a short film on youtube in Polish. I didn't understand a word, but enjoyed it nonetheless. … Takie Czasy

I found a bunch of "Takie Czasy" music videos, too many matches. Can you be more specific please?

Interesting. Assuming you're using my example file, did you speak it directly in Safari, or download it and open it in TextEdit? I noticed that in Safari it is pronounced properly, perhaps because of some automatic correcting of the line endings.

Also, does the new Haiku Detector work in 10.6? I don't have a 10.6 machine to test it on.

Knight Temporal, and Archdeacon of buttermongery and ham and cheese sandwiches. Nobody sells butter except through me.Smiley by yappobiscuits. Avatar by GLR, buffygirl, BlitzGirl & mscha, with cari.j.elliot's idea.Haiku Detectorstarts a trend to make way formy robot army.

Interesting. Assuming you're using my example file, did you speak it directly in Safari, or download it and open it in TextEdit? I noticed that in Safari it is pronounced properly, perhaps because of some automatic correcting of the line endings.

Also, does the new Haiku Detector work in 10.6? I don't have a 10.6 machine to test it on.

No Safari, I use Chrome, but more importantly, I don't trust any web browser to reliably do anything like downloading a textfile from a URL, much less speaking some selected text! I downloaded and opened the file using the Terminal, by typing the commands:

The second command (which is MacOS specific, for any Linux users who may be reading this) launches TextEdit which opens the named text file. Then in TextEdit I did the menu commands Edit > Select All, then Edit > Speech > Start Speaking. Then I heard a GlaDOS-like voice speak, forty-two.Ꮕ On the Tiger system the voice is male. And no, since you asked, the latest Haiku Detector fails to launch in 10.6.8. I wasn't going to mention it, because your latest blog article shows an actual screen shot (yay!) so I know what I would have seen anyway. But if you're interested… system.log shows this:

and I can send you the crash report if you want. But probably not worth it. It looks like you'd have to create a nib without using Cocoa Autolayout, and it's not worth it to recreate your whole UI just for Snow Leopard… you'd have to change the deployment target in Interface Builder (open the nib file, choose Window > Document Info, then select "Deployment target"), and then I think you'd have to regenerate some of the elements of your UI.

— mrob27

Ꮕ(After telling me The Answer, she proceeded to tell me that she thinks the problem is I've never actually known what the question is.)

Aha, thanks for the information. It looks like autolayout came out in 10.7, so I've updated the pages to say it requires 10.7. Perhaps the first version did run in 10.6, and I could perhaps dig up a copy of that (all the links on my site point to the latest version) if you want to try it.

mrob27 wrote:No Safari, I use Chrome, but more importantly, I don't trust any web browser to reliably do anything like downloading a textfile from a URL, much less speaking some selected text! I downloaded and opened the file using the Terminal, by typing the commands:

I don't think it depends on the voice; it's probably a system version thing, as you said. But just out of curiosity, which voices do you have set as your system voice? (Look in the Dictation & Speech pane in the System Preferences, or… well, you could probably find out using defaults read if you really like the terminal, but I'm more of a GUI user myself, so I don't know the specifics.)

I don't remember which version(s) of OS X added all the new voices that speak in different languages and accents, but I'm pretty sure it was after Tiger, so I wonder if that overhaul had anything to do with this bug. The non-English voices don't work with phoneme or TUNE input and I'm afraid that stuff might be being phased out entirely.

mrob27 wrote:Ꮕ(After telling me The Answer, she proceeded to tell me that she thinks the problem is I've never actually known what the question is.)

Perhaps it's 'what do you get if you multiply six by nine?' and my Mac is answering in ℤ3.

Knight Temporal, and Archdeacon of buttermongery and ham and cheese sandwiches. Nobody sells butter except through me.Smiley by yappobiscuits. Avatar by GLR, buffygirl, BlitzGirl & mscha, with cari.j.elliot's idea.Haiku Detectorstarts a trend to make way formy robot army.

THE OTHERRIVERWADUNGISH JAVASCRIPT HAPPENED BEFORE I WAS BORN, YET I'M OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE THIS CONVERSATION WITH YOU. -- ongomome

Spoiler:

LOOK OUT!

Did you notice …… what Cuegan are doing?

Spoiler:

HES, yappobiscuits, Link, HES again, and balthasar_s did… not really.They are pulling the rope with their full wheight to heave the wheelstick. There's a lot of tension in the rope (visible in the upper part and inside the bluecave), but the wheelstick does not move a millicue.